On Fri, Sep 14, 2001 at 09:36:28AM -0500, Steve Greenland wrote:
> We really (okay, you, Anthony :-)) really need to consider the idea
> of allowing architecture slips in testing, if, there's been a package
> that has been waiting more than (say) 10 days on a rebuild on fewer
> than (say) 30% of the architectures.
It's not worth it. The package needs to be fixed anyway, it's better in
every way just to fix it and be done with it.
> That way, the affected packages
> wouldn't break on the recalcitrant architectures, they just won't be as
> current. Yes, that might have be tightened up as we approach release.
The point of testing is that it should always be ready for release.
Having random additional breakage appear regularly and automatically
doesn't really do anything good towards achieving that goal.
> But at least the packages would get more testing on the most used
> architectures.
One of the benefits of testing is that it makes release problems obvious
on a package-by-package basis, so they're a little more likely to be fixed
when they appear rather than all as a bunch when it's time to release.
> Now, if the package won't *build* on the problem architectures, that's
> a different problem. But if the autobuilders are just behind, then the
> people who want to support those architectures need to deal with the
> problem.
If any of the autobuilders do get significantly behind, I've been inclining
testing not to worry if they're out of date. This isn't a problem with the
autobuilders, though.
At the moment, woody's consistency across architectures is significantly
better than potato's on everything but powerpc and m68k, fwiw. It's
overall installability is much better too (well, if you ignore hppa
and ia64). Consider that each of these is by its very nature a RC bug
(the former for being distributed without the correct source, the latter
for making packages completely unusable on some architectures), and that
seems a reasonable achievement.
There're much better ways of avoiding these sorts of problems than saying
"oh, just ignore the brokenness". Some of them are even being worked on...
Cheers,
aj
--
Anthony Towns <aj@humbug.org.au> <http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/>
I don't speak for anyone save myself. GPG signed mail preferred.
``Freedom itself was attacked this morning by faceless cowards.
And freedom will be defended.'' Condolences to all involved.